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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785903">An extract from the memoirs of Samenel Ashryder, bard</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/carcinisation/pseuds/carcinisation'>carcinisation</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Campaign Lore [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dungeons &amp; Dragons (Roleplaying Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, campaign lore</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 21:42:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,787</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785903</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/carcinisation/pseuds/carcinisation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Background to my campaign, a short extract from the memoirs of an NPC.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Campaign Lore [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714162</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>An extract from the memoirs of Samenel Ashryder, bard</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>How we saved the world<br/>
A narrative account of the liberation of Aederlat from hordes of demons<br/>
By Samenel Ashryder, bard and currently, co-ruler of Kalmar</p><p>In my time as an adventurer, I’ve done many awesome and heroic things. I’ve fought dragons. I’ve fought hydras. I’ve fought entire families of vampires. But entire legions of demons weren’t something I’d consider typical. The occasional royal being murdered, yes. The occasional planar rift- not so much, but the Feywild’s nice any time of year, and if you look hard enough there’s always someone making a cult to something best forgotten. Royals being murdered by evil planar entities summoned by a cult to something best forgotten? It’s a little like two new moons and a conjunction of the lower planes on the winter solstice. Rare and bad.</p><p>Myself and the rest of the noble and heroic adventuring group, Illryn &amp; G.A.N.G.; I, Samenel Ashryder, bard extraordinaire, the Lady Grace Galahan, crusader in some army of goodness and virtue, Maris, the best criminal in Kalmar, Tern Garamar, a rather mediocre ranger, and Illryn, a shapeshifting druid whose aura of mystique rivals even my own, were in the Piratical Isles, looking for the mastermind behind a gang of sea raiders in a city full of masterminds and sea raiders. It was a little like looking for one specific frozen bone in a white dragon’s lair. For readers not familiar with white dragons, they like freezing their prey, then picking the frozen meat off the bones. They don’t clean up afterwards.</p><p>Maris, as the one heading the investigation, was poking around a souvenir shop when she heard a discussion of the ‘terrible ravening hordes’ that were ravaging Kalmar. Kalmar being kind of our home, and Aederlat being a bit of a base of operations for us, she asked around, put two and two together and figured that we would be better served making sure there’s a Kalmar to go home to. So, we packed up our stuff and hurried back to Harbour as fast as we could, which is pretty slowly because ships are slow and none of us can teleport. Once in Harbour, we searched around for someone that we could pay to teleport us to Kalmar. Turns out, Harbour, being mainly a fishing town, isn’t a place of huge magical learning. Whoever would have guessed? We then pickled over to Seefrei, where ten minutes of asking got us to a wizard, Silvena Darren, who got us to the outskirts of Aederlat.</p><p>Silvena’s one of the more interesting characters I’ve met along my journeys. A mage, I hear you say. Aren’t they all kind of the same after a while? Most of them are! But occasionally you get one or two outside of the norm, and Silvena qualifies on more than one account. For starters, she’s not (like many other sages I’ve met) one poisoned cupcake away from death. I’ve seen Silvena in two different guises, that of a human woman in her forties, a little shorter than Grace Galahan, with a penchant for the colour green, and that of a ginormous bronze and green dragon about twenty meters taller than me. It was seriously cool, and probably not the best move in what was built as a throne room with a ten-metre-high roof. The ‘secretly a dragon’ bit is what really distinguishes her from other mages though, unless every mage I’ve ever met has secretly been a dragon. Come to think of it, most seem the type. Silvena’s still on my cool list.</p><p>Anyway, so we went into the city with Silvena, who we didn’t know was a dragon. We were stealthing like professionals (which Maris and I were), when Grace fell to one of the problems you encounter when you’re a warrior in full plate armour. Not being very dextrous. Long story short, she fell off a roof. Into a bunch of sentries. Luckily, we did have a surprise round on them, so go us. We soon fell into our normal fighting routine, Grace drawing the fire while Maris stabs them in the back, Tern failing to shoot anything, and Illryn and I casting spells from the back. Or in this case, the roof. Luckily these weren’t the flying type of fiend, or the powerful type, so we took them down fairly quickly. However. They didn’t die quietly. If you’ve ever fought a horde of gibbering demons, then you’ll know that they tend to, well, gibber. This creates noise, which alerts guards, which turns into ‘Grace uses her super special holy abilities to make the small fry run away while Illryn and Maris violently dispatch everything else’. We had to then blast through about five rooms of fiends before we got to the throne room, which the commanding guy had repurposed as headquarters as some sort of intimidatory tactic. The throne room, which doubles as the ballroom on important days, is actually built to intimidate visiting dignitaries, so has some very impressive architecture; throne centrally placed, big dais, tapestries with subtle linework towards the throne, the works. When we go there, the tapestries and other flammable stuff had been flamed pretty thoroughly, so a decent part of the grandeur of the place had been replaced with a more “cross us and you end up like the tapestries” vibe, which, to be honest, not really what the architect intended, also kind of an eyesore. Of course, we had to put a stop to that.</p><p>There were a lot of creatures in that room. Most of the type normally used to terrify small children into misbehaving- as heroic adventurers, we weren’t fazed, but I would not recommend fighting demon lords if you’re hoping to get a good night’s sleep.</p><p>As one, we stormed the room, Illryn and I making gratuitous use of area-of-effect spells to take out the small fry while Grace, Maris, and Tern focused in on the big guy. The denizens of the Nine Hells are courteous to demon slayers- the more dangerous types are always bigger, which makes it easy to discern at a glance which are going to be particularly annoying. The ones we encountered were of a type we had not fought before- a novelty for as experienced a group as us. Fortunately, we had done our research, and so thus did not go into battle entirely unaware of what we were facing.</p><p>What happened next was one of the most chaotic battles I’ve ever been in. I think every member of the group was unconscious at one point or another, and we all finished battered and bruised, with every last drop of magic spent. Happily, cleaning spells take almost no power, so we also finished stylishly, with armour gleaming, and blood left on our weapons for dramatic effect. “What happened in the battle?” I hear you ask. Truthfully, I can only tell what I have been told- after blasting minions left right &amp; centre, I was led away from the main struggle, making sure any more creatures didn’t join and make my friends’ lives more difficult than they already were. It has been recounted to me by one Tern Garamar that the battle was hard, long, and exhausting, and an altogether unpleasant experience, as battles often are. I myself would have died if I had not placed a contingent healing spell on myself, set to activate when I fell unconscious. Without that, I would undoubtedly have died a heroic, noble, and tragic death being mauled and eaten by extraplanar horrors, and future generations would be deprived of this chronicle.</p><p>After all that, we shuffled over to the Temple of Nehima, which was unbothered by fiends, being hallowed ground that they’re barred from, so there were some staff members and civilians who had been trapped there, unable to leave due to the creatures outside the gates. Luckily for us, some of the staff members were clerics, and thus we were able to crash there for an hour while we healed up and gathered support.</p><p>Then came the really hard bit. When tales of adventurers are told, they often stop after the heroes take out the Big Bad, and leave out the bit where they have to hunt down all the remaining Little Bads for weeks on end. We hunted down the Little Bads for weeks on end. This was the part of the adventure where Tern actually came in very handy; his particular skillset being heavily geared towards tracking, so we managed to complete the task in less time than it may have otherwise taken.</p><p>I won’t bore my readers with an extensive description of the many weeks we trekked across the countryside. Suffice to say, it took a long time and it was pretty monotonous, save for that one time we fell down this abandoned mineshaft and accidentally got surrounded by troglodytes. That was embarrassing, so I will not recount the tale here. Nothing worse than unexpected troglodytes.</p><p>It was once we were fairly sure that every last creature had been hunted down that we traced the invasion back to the rift they came out of. Closing the rift was a difficult endeavour as planar portals, once opened, tend to either close almost immediately or stick around for centuries. This one was fairly well anchored, so we had to call in backup to close it, but happily two wizards were enough to do the job. The part most personally significant to me came after that. I can’t say I was unaware that Illryn and Maris were uncomfortable with the amount of public attention we were gathering and the semi-official organisational roles we had assumed, but I hadn’t expected Tern to leave with them. It was a long discussion- Grace managed to keep it from fully ever descending into an argument, but the conclusion was that Grace and I were the only ones who wished see Aederlat rebuilt, and aid in that process, and that the best solution was for Grace and I to leave and take on fully the governmental roles we had partly assumed in the direct aftermath of the invasion. The remainder of the group were to travel the Wilds in search of interesting times, and hopefully sink into anonymity for the rest of their days. They have not been seen since, which tops out Illryn’s concluding mystique as better than mine. Nothing better than disappearing into the anonymity from which you came to really settle a long rivalry between you and your friend about which of you is the most mysteriously cool.</p><p>The Lady Galahan and I then took up the positions we currently hold, and that was about it for my days as an adventurer of the G.A.N.G..</p>
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